New UM exhibit revives golden age of Cuban telenovelas

By Coral Gables Gazette staff

Before Cuba’s revolution changed everything, its airwaves were already shaping a continent’s imagination. A new exhibition at the University of Miami’s Otto G. Richter Library uncovers how Havana’s pioneering radio and television dramas laid the groundwork for what the world would come to know as the telenovela.

Opening Thursday, October 30 at 6 p.m. in the Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion, The Telenovela Archives: Serialized Fiction in Cuba Before the Revolution gathers photographs, magazines, advertising art, books, periodicals, films, and videos that chart the genre’s rise from domestic entertainment to cultural export. Curated by Juan Andrés Bello and Constanza Burucúa, Ph.D., the exhibition draws from the University’s Cuban Heritage Collection and the independent Telenovela Archives, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the London Arts Council, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Western Ontario, Triana Media and Cinemateca Brasileira.

Cuba’s storytelling boom that preceded a revolution

By the late 1940s, Cuban broadcasters had mastered serialized storytelling on radio, crafting nightly dramas that kept families tethered to their sets. Productions such as El Derecho de Nacer revealed how moral allegory and emotional suspense could coexist in popular form. When television arrived in Havana a decade later, those same writers and producers adapted seamlessly, creating multi-episode narratives that spread across Latin America long before Mexico and Brazil turned the format into global export.

The exhibition positions these programs as the missing first chapter in the history of Latin American television—evidence that Cuba’s creative industries were already sophisticated, commercial, and transnational before politics disrupted them. Each display case tells part of that story: publicity photographs of stars, annotated scripts, and vintage studio advertisements that merge glamour with civic pride.

Archival rediscoveries bridge Havana and Miami

Many of the items on view were preserved through exile. The Cuban Heritage Collection’s vast holdings include magazines, correspondence, and production ephemera rescued from defunct studios such as CMQ Televisión. These artifacts link the lost creative infrastructure of Havana with the memory networks of Miami, where exiled writers and actors continued to shape the genre.

Through its visual design, the show evokes both a mid-century newsroom and a soundstage—inviting visitors to walk through the mechanics of serialized production. Stills from early broadcasts share space with fan letters and marketing tie-ins, illustrating how storytelling, advertising, and identity intertwined in Cuban popular culture.

A legacy carried abroad by its creators

After 1959, many of the artists who had defined Cuba’s serials resettled elsewhere. Among them was Delia Fiallo, later celebrated as the “mother of the Latin American telenovela,” whose scripts for Venezuelan television spread the Cuban narrative blueprint across the hemisphere. Her career, and those of her contemporaries, underscore the exhibition’s central insight: exile did not extinguish a tradition—it globalized it.

The curators use these biographies to trace how a distinctly Cuban invention evolved into one of the most enduring narrative forms in the world. By doing so, the show restores intellectual authorship to a generation often overshadowed by the political rupture that followed their departure.

An evening that honors memory and craft

The opening reception begins at 6 p.m., followed by a 7 p.m. program in the Goizueta Pavilion, 1300 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables. Admission is free.

Visitors will find both scholarship and sentiment in the assembled works. For academics, it is a case study in early transnational media; for Cuban-American audiences, it is a retrieval of a shared inheritance. In reviving the scripts, images, and sounds of a vanished broadcasting era, The Telenovela Archives reclaims Cuba’s place in the origins of Latin America’s beloved art form.

Author: Coral Gables Gazette News Staff

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